Dailies Overlook Military Advances

Revolutionary developments in strategy,
tactics given scant attention in Denver

Three years ago today, Islamist terrorists attacked
the United States. For some people, everything changed. For others, very little
changed, and in the latter category are much of the media.

The Denver Post promised to change, and for a while it did. The paper
dispatched a bunch of its reporters all over the Middle East and Central Asia.
The paper printed article after article reporting the life stories and the
political perspectives of ordinary men and women in Pakistan, Egypt, and other
little-understood countries. Had thePostsustained the high level of
Middle East/Central Asia coverage, the paper would have taken a huge step toward
fulfilling publisher Dean Singleton's goal of making the Postone of the
Top 5 newspapers in the United States.

But today, international affairs in the Postand the Rocky Mountain
Newsare covered almost exclusively with the same collection of stories from
the Associated Press, The New York Times,and a few other papers which
appeared in the Denver papers before Sept. 11.

Like most of the rest of the traditional media, the Denver papers remain
alarmingly deficient in military coverage. The Denver papers produce their own
excellent coverage of Colorado soldiers and their families. Relying mainly on
national wire services, the papers have done an adequate job on military stories
which have been generated from traditional news venues within the United States
- such as the various investigations of Abu Ghraib, controversial statements by
American politicians, and news about military enlistment and re-enlistment.
(Although the latter stories have been spun to appear far more dire than the
data would suggest.)

But where the Denver papers have utterly failed - because the wire services
have likewise failed - has been in coverage of the revolution in military
strategy and tactics which has taken place in the last several years.

For example, during the invasion of Afghanistan, American commandos were able
to call in precision naval bombardment when they spotted appropriate targets.
Never before in the history of warfare have the massive guns on ships been able
to be fired against precise targets hundreds of miles inland, based on
information supplied in real time by infantry forces. This breakthrough in
combined arms coordination marks a tremendous shift of the balance of power in
favor of the United States military, compared to the situation just a few years
ago.

Compared to the Vietnam era, U.S. forces are vastly more mobile, more
successful at shutting down enemy artillery and have better-trained snipers than
any army in history, who can hit targets 2 miles away. These are some of the
reasons that the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were far more
successful than previous invasions of those countries by the Soviet Union and
the United Kingdom.

In the Colorado media, KOA evening radio host Bob Newman is virtually alone
in presenting a sophisticated understanding of military science.

More than a thousand American soldiers have died, and nearly 8,000 have been
wounded in Iraq. When the death count reached 1,000 this week, it was a major
story. But the press ignored two important facts, which have been reported by
the excellent military news Web site StategyPage.com.

First, the wounded/killed ratio of 8:1 is very high; historically, the rate
has been about 4:1 or 5:1. The unusually high ratio suggests that American
medical personnel are doing an outstanding job of saving soldiers with
life-threatening injuries, and that military body armor is saving many lives.

Second, explains Strategy Page, the overall casualty rate is astonishingly
low for such a large force with many hundreds of patrols and combat operations
daily. "Never have combat divisions, operating in hostile territory, kept their
casualties this low . . . The American armed forces have developed new
equipment, weapons and tactics that have transformed combat operations in an
unprecedented way. This is recognized within the military, but is generally
ignored, or misunderstood, by the general media."

Two columns ago, I mocked the Kerry campaign for claiming that Kerry
had been in the Mekong Delta, near Cambodia. On a map, the place where the
Mekong begins to look like the Greek letter "delta" (a triangle) is about 50
miles east of Cambodia. Nevertheless, the wetlands of the lower Mekong River
include all of the river's path in Vietnam, and parts of Cambodia. Many people
call these wetlands the "Mekong Delta," so I was wrong to tweak the Kerry
spokesman. I was also wrong in stating the Mekong never parallels the
Vietnam-Cambodia border; marshland which feeds into the Mekong does parallel the
border in some areas.

CBS, The Boston Globe,and, derivatively, the Newsand
the Post,have been running big stories based on the supposed discovery
of new documents about George Bush's service in the National Guard. But the
blogosphere has exposed at least several of the documents as probable forgeries.
Led by the Powerline blog, the blogosphere on Sept. 9 pointed out extensive
evidence of forgery, including the fact that the documents have curly
apostrophes instead of a straight apostrophes, and superscipt the "th" following
some ordinal numbers. Typewriters back in 1972-73 did not have curly single
quote marks, or superscripted letters. On Sept. 10, the Post had nothing
to say about the forgery evidence, while the Newsran a story in which
the son of the (deceased) purported author of the documents disputed their
authenticity.

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